Old woodland evokes sharply atavistic emotions. Forests are at the very core of countless children’s stories; archetypes with the deepest and most sinuous of roots. To walkers, wild woods are irresistible, and this is partly why we protect such places so fiercely now. While the farmed countryside, treasured and loved by ramblers as it is, will always have an element of the quotidian, wild wood seems to take walkers somewhere else. You can lose your way physically while losing yourself in reverie. There is also that edge of anarchy: unlike the open countryside, forests – whether they are privately owned or not – feel as though they belong to everyone and no one. The trees have their own presence and dignity, older and more enduring than any ephemeral property deeds or leases.
Woodland offers the walker something more rewarding and complex than a simple linear trek. Even the very least committed amblers and dawdlers – the weekend trippers in the family MPVs – are drawn irresistibly to those chunkily signposted ‘woodland trails’ to be found all over the country. This is tangentially to do with modern environmental sensibility. The deliberate cutting down of an old tree can be felt as keenly as an amputation. That is only a part of it, though, and overlooks the important fact that we felt this way about the wild woods a very long time before the term ‘environment’ was ever used. Obviously we are drawn to the mellow subterranean colours, the diffused light, the silence and the chance of seeing rare plants. But there is a great deal more there too.
The nature of some forests can prevent walkers ever feeling wholly tranquil within them. That is also part of the pleasure. The Royal Forest of Dean, for instance, has one of the most curious reputations of anywhere in the British Isles. You wouldn’t perhaps immediately know it on a bright day as you clamber around those lush green hillsides of the Wye Valley, or wander around the upbeat museums devoted to the area’s mining history. Plough further into those rich thickets, which seemingly stretch for illimitable miles, and you begin to feel that sense of apartness. Someone recently described the Forest of Dean as a sort of independent republic, locked away in a patch of land that lies between the rivers Severn and Wye. The reputation might perhaps be best described as a sort of inwardness; that those who live in the Forest have little care for anything that happens outside of it. Possibly this identity is the result of a combination of remoteness (there are few main roads) and the eccentric nature of the very woodland itself. Walkers will see this most strikingly in Puzzle Wood, near Cinderford: fantastically gnarled trees form natural corridors with vast grey boulders and soft moss. Elsewhere, near the village of St Briavels, there is an expanse of protected woodland called Hudnalls Wood, containing a rich array of beech, oak and elm.
The walkers who come to stay at St Briavels are chiefly here for the many miles of woodlands. The village is almost ringed with them. For those who have never been to the Forest of Dean, the area sounds slightly too abstract to really get a purchase on. The minute you plunge into it, the storybook feel of the locale swiftly steals over you. If walking is partly about escapism, then the sort of imaginative escape offered in these parts is nearly overwhelming. Little wonder that vast woodlands such as these have echoed throughout British literature and art.
Hudnalls Wood lies on the great gorge of the Wye that twists and turns through this quiet world. From St Briavels, you can gaze out across the vast thickly wooded valley, and imagine quite easily that it is the sort of fantasy land that you see portrayed naffly on the covers of novels involving men in robes with swords, and wizards (oh, and quickly shake your head to dispel the image; it’s a form of desecration). When Hudnalls Wood is approached from the tiny road that leads to St Briavels Common – there is barely enough room for one car, let alone two – the feeling of otherness is heightened.
A green sign proclaiming a ‘restricted byway’ points rightwards. You turn – and then look down into a beguiling prospect. You find yourself descending through a natural pergola, a passage of dim green, tightly-wound tree life leading sharply downwards. This is a footpath that resembles the old hollow ways that can still be found in Dorset and other parts of the West Country. The sharp gradient gives rise to quite another impression: that you are descending into some kind of jade underworld. This sense is intensified dramatically after a few yards when suddenly, the path brings you to the edge of an extraordinarily lush, tree-filled crevasse. You can go left or right at this point, along a tiny muddy stony ledge, looking down at quite a drop – but you cannot see its full extent, simply because the view is jammed with trees sprouting out of the steep hillside. It is a forest flipped sideways. There is an old and oddly sacred atmosphere here – one that any walker can savour when the strange and unique history of the area is known.
One of the Forest’s most famous sons is the late television playwright Dennis Potter. In 1962 – a few years before he composed the Forest-set Blue Remembered Hills – he wrote a short, polemical book about the area’s past, and its deeply uncertain future. In the early 1960s, even among all the soughing woodland, mining was still a very strong ongoing concern and the major employer for some miles. Coal was the economic engine of all these little towns, which lay physically and spiritually somewhere between the brash modernism of England and the close chapel-bound psyche of Wales. In one passage, Potter describes a time when his miner father, and his father’s old mentor, were walking back home after work. It was dark, and the two men were making their way in silence through the murk of the woods:
All the old Forest stories, the tales told to children, the mining superstitions related to danger at work, the country superstitions based on isolation and history and religion, welled out of them to create an old and unknowable fear … it is (or was) a small part of the strong feeling of being ‘a Forester’, something complex and unique, something that outsiders were rarely expected to understand.1
The mines are all gone now, save for a few individual private concerns. In 1962, Potter saw this end coming, but could not quite bear it: ‘It is not enough to say that the Forest’s future must be that of a tourist playground surrounded by a few ugly villages inhabited by employed young women and out-of-work old men.’ To be fair, even if it is a draw to many, the Forest is not quite so vulgarised as to be considered a ‘playground’. And in the early weeks of 2011, it found itself in a rather different position as the focus of an intense political campaign.
The Coalition government was proposing to sell off chunks of Forestry Commission land, meaning that hectares could end up in the possession of private owners who could conceivably then restrict access; the very notion sparked a very middle class form of outrage – letters to the grander newspapers, local authors writing articles. The Forest of Dean came to symbolise all that we appear to hold most sacrosanct about woodland: not merely the right to roam, but also that of land that is owned by no one, with old trees that grow free – rather than regimented lines of soulless commercial conifers stifling other varieties of woodland plants. The campaign to ‘save the woodland’ tapped into a long held myth that England until the Middle Ages was one vast land of wild forests; that kings, commoners and deer all roamed in bosky bliss; that Shakespeare’s Forest of Arden, with all its associations of spiritual freedom, was in some way an English Eden from which we had yet to be expelled.
Certainly the Foresters (as the locals are termed) have been vocal in asserting their ancient rights. And they have attracted much support from elsewhere. There is, among ramblers and conservationists alike, an anxiety that Britain is steadily losing swathes of its native forests, and has been for centuries. In wider terms, though, could there be some historical misunderstanding about the range and extent of ancient woodlands? In his ground-breaking 1955 history, The Making of the English Landscape, W. G. Hoskins asserted that when ‘we read that one Durham man alone was said in 1629 to have felled more than thirty thousand oaks in his lifetime, and reflect that similar destruction was going on in all the ironworking districts of England – in the Weald, the Forest of Dean, round Birmingham and Sheffield, and in the Clee Hills – we can envisage something of the extent of woodland lost between 1500 and 1688.’ In addition to this, ‘the revolutionary improvements in farming in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries led to large tracts of woodland being grubbed up for corn and cattle.’2
Even back in the nineteenth century, there were those who felt a nostalgia for woodland that they felt sure had disappeared many aeons beforehand. Thus William Wordsworth in 1810, writing of how the landscape of England had changed:
Formerly the whole country must have been covered with wood to a great height up the mountains; where native Scotch firs must have grown in great profusion, as they do in the northern part of Scotland to this day. But not one of these old inhabitants has existed, perhaps, for some hundreds of years; the beautiful traces, however, of the universal sylvan appearance the country formerly had, yet survive in the native coppice-woods that have been protected by enclosures, and also in the forest-trees and hollies which, though disappearing fast, are yet scattered over the enclosed and unenclosed part of the mountains.
The question still remains though: what was the extent of those original woodlands? More recently, the naturalist and landscape historian Professor Oliver Rackham has taken a slightly different view, ingeniously extrapolating from the Domesday Book that, in the eleventh century, England was composed of 35 per cent arable land, 15 per cent woodland and wood pasture, and 1 per cent meadow. Pasture came in at an estimated 30%. The rest was ‘mountains, heaths, moorland and fen.’3 So while it is perfectly obvious that old forests have been whittled down over the course of the centuries the landscape, some argue, still might not have changed all that dramatically over the last millennium. On top of this, we may be getting tangled up in thickets of linguistic confusion. ‘To the medievals,’ wrote Professor Rackham, ‘a Forest was a place of deer, not a place of trees.’ As such, the term ‘forest’ could also include moorlands and heath – look at today’s ‘forest of Dartmoor’ as confirmation.
As we have seen from recent protests, woodland holds such a strong grip on the national imagination because it chimes so deeply with anarchy, and openness, and freedom. From the legend of Robin Hood and his outlaws to Just William and his outlaws – it is easy to see the romantic pull of the forest. Children love woods because this is territory that they can make their own. They can climb the trees, make shelters out of sight of the grown-ups. Natural wildwood defies order; it is the exact opposite to the regimentation of agriculture and the strictures of land ownership.
Places such as Hudnalls Wood, and other parts of the Wye Valley, can have an interesting psychological effect upon the walker too. Just as ridgeways and escarpments and blowy heaths have a tendency to temporarily empty the mind, deep old woodland can conversely set the mind working. The sound of soft footfall on twig or moss, the feel of snaking tree roots pressing into the arches of the foot, even the semi-light seeping through the canopy above, encourage inward reflection. The mind does not skitter when one is walking through woodland; rather, it slows down, works at a more considered pace. There are individual moments of pure, utterly unconscious delight: the tiny glimpse of bright blue from above through the thick green leaves; the even more fleeting glimpse, from far above, of the coiling, dark blue River Wye. There are also moments of silent surprise. For instance, having picked my way gingerly along the narrow ledge near the top of Hudnalls Wood, absorbing the fantastical shapes of the old trees (one pokes a thick branch out across the path like a giant squid), I suddenly find myself in a clearing, filled with profoundly pink rhododendrons, and intense red roses. There is neat grass, and clipped bushes, and more blood-red flowers, and an open sky. The contrast makes you blink. Then the path descends into thicker woods, deep green depths. The word Tolkienesque would be perfectly applicable here, since parts of Lord of the Rings were indeed said to have been inspired by visits to the Forest of Dean.
Even though the path is clear, the way through the woods is rarely straightforward. There is always an obstacle, be it the thick red trunks of fallen trees, or collapsed branches, or the mulchy mud around streams that gurgle humorously; walkers are forced to make a hundred tiny decisions as they move forwards. Unlike the wide open hill tops, where the conscious mind can disappear into a trance of abstraction, woodland requires you to stay alert, and near the surface of consciousness.
Most walkers have been steeped in images and stories of woodland since early childhood, via such diverse means as Hansel and Gretel, Little Red Riding Hood, and Rupert Bear’s ‘Nutwood’. Forests are partly how, as youngsters, we come to understand the world. We have also been immersed, as a culture, in literary forests that carry a similar charge to the old fairy tales. It is extremely natural that walkers should, even on a subconscious level, seek out a similarly transfiguring experience. In Shakespeare’s plays, characters come to the woods to enter a different sort of world. People get lost; they are lured onto false paths; they encounter ambiguous figures. From A Midsummer Night’s Dream to As You Like It, we see in the landscape of Shakespeare’s imagination that the woodland – the Forest of Arden – is a place where people can finally, truly, be themselves.
In other stories, the forests are also often a labyrinth, in which moral choices have to be made, or grave jeopardy faced. In Book III of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, the forest into which the squire rides is vast and wild; he is unaware that deadly enemies are hiding among the trees, waiting to strike him down. The wounded squire is discovered by a beautiful wood nymph. She sees that she must use her arts to treat the injured man, and to take him to her woodland fastness. Here, the forest is associated not merely with hermetic and feminine knowledge, of herbs, simples and enchantments; but here under these canopies also run deep erotic undercurrents. This is not to suggest that ramblers are in search of similar erotic undercurrents – we leave that for the more specialised outdoor enthusiasts. In a slightly broader sense, though, many walkers exploring woodland are certainly looking for a homeopathic elixir of that feeling of mystery, that sense of entering another realm conjured by Rudyard Kipling in ‘The Way Through The Woods’: ‘Yet if you enter the woods/Of a summer evening late/When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools/Where the otter whistles his mate …’
The labyrinthine nature of woodland is important; there have been times, when I have been strolling through Epping Forest, to the north east of London, when I have found myself lost. Even on a sunny early autumn afternoon, amid the richness of the last summer colours, such disorientation in the geographical sense can be a little unsettling. When you stop moving, and stand still, there are moments when the rest of the forest is perfectly still as well. Not even the stir of a small animal or a bird can be heard. It is as though time has been paused. Then there is the faintly unsettling sensation of hearing other people – perhaps a family with small children, giggling and laughing – but never quite seeing them through the trees. Are they really there? Or are they some manifestation of the forest itself?
The seclusion and privacy of the Forest of Dean lure in other sorts of tree lovers too. It is not so unusual to come across white witches in a clearing, performing rites on certain sacred calendar days. Whatever our reasons for being there, there is the very specific aesthetic pleasure of following a woodland path; that sense both of being away from one’s everyday world, yet also being rather hemmed in within a new one. You lose your sense of direction here very quickly, and also your sense of distance. The walker gives himself up to woodland. The mind is still working, still making those tiny decisions, but the feet and the legs are somehow yielding to the shapes of those paths, following their curves as though preconditioned.
Here in the Wye Valley, in a landscape so fretted with ancient mystery and geological curiosity – our eyes are constantly flickering over the path beyond, either to rest on the fantastical ridged carvings of an old oak or yew, or to gaze upon the green glowing moss on a sensuously rounded boulder on the forest floor. There is such a thing as the ‘Sculpture Trail’ in this Forest – an arts project in which various creations wrought from wood and steel have been purposefully placed at certain points. And given that these pieces are intended to represent the Forest’s industrial past, it is all very commendable. There are perfectly natural sculptures here too; from the occasional free-standing boulder, that will put you in mind of Arthurian legend, and the Sword in The Stone; to the rich lichen climbing the branch of an old tree. ‘Trees in more rural areas should have grey, brown, green and yellow lichens,’ wrote Professor Oliver Rackham. In these parts, it seems luminous in the rich semi-darkness.
Another great attraction for walkers – one that works lightly on the imagination as they explore – is that this Royal Forest can boast an almost Ruritanian past; we think of the conquering Normans, who, in their love of hunting, introduced Forest Law here in the twelfth century. This meant that they appointed the wonderfully named Verderers – men whose job it was to look after the deer and wild boar populations. The Royal Forest of Dean remained a rich hunting ground throughout the Tudor period, though there was also industry, in the form of iron ore, timber and, to a limited degree, coal. As the demand for coal went up at the dawn of the new industrial age, there was already a tradition in place that any man aged over the age of twenty-one, who had worked for a year and a day down a mine, had the right to become a ‘freeminer’ – that is, one who had his own small portion of coal or ore that he could dig from the ground.
Here too are ancient burial grounds. The main thing we hear through all historical accounts is that there exists a sense of apartness, uniqueness. It is this quality that is so irresistible to walkers. For in such a place, the rambler feels the prospect of self-transformation, of being lifted out of themselves.
While we enjoy forests there is also buried deep within our culture an innate wariness of woodland dwellers. You hear it in modern urban rumours and in nineteenth-century tales about gipsy brigands. Yet this ambiguity has also found expression in one of the greatest of our national myths. Once the star of minstrels’ ballads, and still the central hero figure in big screen films and television series alike, Robin Hood is the ultimate expression of the schizophrenic approach to woodland – the freedom it offers, yet also the sense that to live there makes one an outcast from society.
Thanks to this medieval ballad turned sylvan legend, the most famous of all England’s woodland remains Sherwood Forest, even if it is only a scrap of what it apparently used to be. Nor could the forest live up to the expectations of Daniel Defoe in the eighteenth century: ‘This Forest does not add to the fruitfulness of the County,’ he wrote, ‘for ’tis now, as it were, given up to Waste.’ By this, he meant bare heathland: ‘Even the Woods which formerly made it so famous for Thieves, are Wasted; and if there was such a man as Robin Hood, a famous Out Law and Deer Stealer, that so many years harboured here, he would hardly find Shelter for one week, if he was now to have been there; nor is there any store of Deer.’
Back in the 1980s, a party of sixth formers from my west London school came down to St Briavels for a long weekend, on the pretext of some geographical themed weekend, though really more for a laugh. We stayed in the St Briavels youth hostel, a fancy affair consisting of a twelfth-century keep – a small castle – filled with all the paraphernalia of bunk beds and very sparsely equipped kitchens. King John once used the place as a hunting lodge. Gamely, the hostel now keeps such associations going with weekly medieval Banquets. There is still a grand courtyard, and although water no longer ripples in the moat, the shape of it remains, giving the place a very regal sense of separateness. It is a cross between an imposing National Trust antiquity and a Mike Leigh film set. It seems in some ways to symbolise what is so very fine about the Youth Hostel Movement, and why it seems to have been part of the walker’s landscape for rather longer than it actually has. When I was first there, in 1984, things were rather sober. Youth hostels were uniformly unlicensed, and alcohol was strictly forbidden on the premises. That did not stop us smuggling grog in our suitcases; one girl even brought along a bottle of Cointreau. There are no limits to the horrors of teenage drinking tastes. But the teetotal element is part of what made these establishments such a draw to more serious-minded young people in the 1930s, when the Youth Hostel Movement, inspired by pioneering establishments in Europe, really got underway. The idea of these hostels originated at a meeting of the Liverpool and District Ramblers’ Federation in 1929. It attracted interest from various bodies such as the National Council of Social Service and, shortly afterwards, the Youth Hostel Association (YHA) was formed.
The first hostel was in Wales: Pennant Hall in the Conwy Valley, which opened in December 1930. Soon after there were 73 hostels, all over the country; by 1933, there were 180. The first President of the YHA was historian G. M. Trevelyan – himself a fervent walker who was wont to trick guests staying with him in Northumberland into undertaking 30-mile hikes. In 1931, he gave a radio broadcast on the BBC, to explain the philosophy behind this new movement. The intention, he said, was to help young city dwellers of limited means. He wanted them to get ‘a greater knowledge, care and love of the countryside’, to rediscover their rural roots. The only way to do this effectively, he argued, was to stay in the countryside for three or four days. With hostels roughly 15 miles apart, ‘the walker can easily get from one to another in a day.’4
Trevelyan, an energetic and passionate Oxford academic, was the brother of Charles Trevelyan, an MP who in 1908 had tried to follow in the footsteps of James Bryce in an attempt to get together a Bill to allow access to English moorlands and uplands. Trevelyan was a spiritual heir to the Sunday Tramps, but he brought a more elegiac approach to his love for the land. In his view, it was a beauty that was fast disappearing. By the 1930s, towns and cities across the country were experiencing a huge building boom; it seemed to people like Trevelyan that these urban masses were enveloping and suffocating the surrounding countryside.
He had, a few years previously, written an essay that he was later to dismiss as ‘exceedingly mad’ – yet the points he made were finding echoes in commentators all over the country. He asserted that since the mid nineteenth century, ‘a population living in country cottages and small towns’ had been replaced by ‘a population living a wholly artificial life in great cities.’ These great cities rather resembled, in his imagination, the subterranean hell inhabited by H. G. Well’s Morlocks – a world not merely of squalor and smog, but also of pubs and public drunkenness, loutish newspapers and low music halls. The city, he wrote, represented ‘ugliness, vulgarity, materialism, the insipid negation of everything that has been accounted good in the past history of man.’5
There are some in the country who would find that difficult to disagree with even today. But there was also a note of melancholia abroad about the essence of English natural beauty being on the brink of being lost forever. This sense of imminent loss is, we realise, quite a constant theme in the story of walking.
In Trevelyan’s History of England, written after the First World War, there is a swooping passage where he reaches right back into the roots of the English countryside in order to tell us exactly what we have destroyed:
What a place it must have been, that virgin woodland wilderness of Anglo-Saxon England … still harbouring God’s plenty of all manner of beautiful birds and beasts, and still rioting in the vast wealth of trees and flowers – treasures which modern man, careless of his best inheritance, has abolished, and is still abolishing, as fast as new tools and methods of destruction can be invented.
Here, we can clearly make out the resonant aftershock of the Somme, of Passchendaele, of those haunted, shattered landscapes reduced to mud and blood and bone. Trevelyan conflated the inexorable march of industry with the industry of death that was the mark of the horror of the Great War.
Yet that conflict also brought with it an unexpected social repercussion that would facilitate Trevelyan’s desire for the masses to enjoy the land. The war had ripped away a significant proportion of the young male upper classes, and in the post-war years, many of the great aristocratic estates would be broken up. For the first time since the Enclosure Acts, the future of many areas of countryside was looking uncertain.
In 1925, Trevelyan became involved with another enduring institution – the National Trust. He was especially interested in Lord Brownlow’s Ashridge estate in the Chilterns: an example of an old estate that was selling up in the aftermath of the war. Trevelyan, using all his influence, persuaded various philanthropists both to contribute and to campaign for the Ashridge estate to go to the National Trust. It did so and is now a favourite among walkers. It is the Youth Hostellers who owe Trevelyan a special debt of gratitude. In 1936, he wrote an introduction to Walking Tours and Hostels in England – a few paragraphs which encapsulated everything that he wanted the explorers of the land to enjoy:
I especially want to recommend [this book] to those who have discovered the Youth Hostel Association and its Hostels and are already fortunate enough to be enrolled as members … for there is no movement I believe to be better or more necessary than ours during these latter days. Mankind, particularly in our island, has been locked up in the great cities away from nature and from its health and beauty. Our race, almost more than any other, is denied the natural use of its limbs which machinery displaces, is denied the enjoyment of the old human instincts, the delight in sunset and sunrise, noontide and dew, woodland, field and running stream, valleys, woods and hills.
For hundreds of thousands of years, mankind was bred on the lap of Nature. It is only in this last century that he has suddenly been seized upon and locked away from his mother earth, locked away from God’s country in man’s ugly artificial towns, where he sees nothing of Nature but a thin strip of sky between the chimney pots. It is not, and it cannot come to good.6
His words – and the fast growing network of hostels – caught something of a national mood. As veteran rambler John Bunting recalls, in places like Sheffield the young people divided into those who wanted to spend their time dancing, and those who were desperate to jump on their bikes and cycle into the countryside. These new youth hostels presented the lower-paid with a fantastic new holiday possibility. Instead of heading to the pleasure beaches, there was now a chance to investigate the deep countryside properly, at no great cost. This is what Mr Bunting and his friends did when young; they took a few days off and cycled a huge distance over the north, staying at youth hostels along the way and embarking on epic hikes from each fresh location.
In the 1930s, a night’s stay would cost one shilling. A small charge was also made if you sat down for an evening meal or breakfast. You could also pay a minimal amount for a specially prepared packed lunch if you were heading off for a long hike. Certainly, the accommodation was rather austere – starting as it meant to go on, the bedrooms consisted of single sex dormitories, filled with bunk beds. In some hostels, the roofs were rather rackety and had holes. But if you were a young man or woman, from a heavily industrialised town, then in most cases you were actually coming from accommodation that was even sparser: crowded houses, shared bathrooms, outside lavatories, damp, mildew, insufficient heating. Conversely, the prospect of a youth hostel – clean, bright, out in the open – would have looked to some rather luxurious.
One early enthusiast summed it up:
The Youth Hostel spirit I cannot accurately convey, it has to be experienced. It is social in that it brings together walkers and cyclists in fellowship with a minimum of restriction. But, most of all, it contributes to the service of beauty – not the outward beauty of our national heritage, for which we in this generation have to be vigilant trustees, but the inward beauty, which in words depends on simplicity – I mean the true simplicity of a rightly and nobly ordered mind and character.
One edition of The Ramblers’ Handbook went a little further with this almost poetic sentiment: ‘[The YHA] opens the way to the sea and the hills for those who know only the smell of the streets and the noise of the traffic … it enables a young man or woman to plan and carry out their own escape from the towns.’
In this, we again also catch a scent of non-conformism, of the enthusiastic teetotal movement. Moreover, many hostels had a very strict ‘lights out’ policy; some as early as 10 p.m. Paradoxically, these rigid rules brought a fresh level of freedom to a growing constituency of female walkers. For with any hint of licentiousness firmly eradicated, hostels all over the country were regarded as proper and respectable places. The YHA helped to open up the countryside for young female friends from all backgrounds, who could now take off and find a place to go far from the demands of the men in their lives, or the expectations of men in the seaside resorts such as Blackpool. The strictly segregated sleeping arrangements firmly dispelled even any thoughts of wild promiscuity. Old-fashioned ideas of chaperoning were melting away; the modern world was starting to acknowledge that girls were every bit as entitled as boys to enjoy holidays with friends.
On top of this, for all the austerity of the facilities, there were some startlingly grand youth hostels to be found. Because of help from bodies such as The Forestry Commission, as well as charitable concerns like the Cadbury Trust and the Carnegie Trust, properties were either donated or lent out on leases. Which is why hostels could end up in locations as spectacular as St Briavels castle; this fresh use rather came to the rescue of an otherwise decaying, expensive to run structure.
Come the 1940s and 50s – and accelerating in the 1960s and 70s – a new genre of youth hostel visitor began to emerge: the middle-aged, middle class, Guardian-reading walking enthusiast. Rather than succumb to the vulgar siren calls of foreign beach holidays, these hardy folk, often with their children, would pitch up, clanking their own knives and forks (for the kitchens in youth hostels were sparsely equipped).
Naturally, the inception of the National Parks in the early 1950s brought a concomitant upswing in interest, for here were millions of acres of wild walking territory dotted with youth hostels. Again, Trevelyan had been a noisy enthusiast for the Parks and had made all sorts of representations to the then Chancellor Hugh Dalton, another keen walker. Meanwhile, hostels became such familiar establishments that it was soon as though they had been around for a century, rather than just a couple of decades.
The new wave of middle class youth hostellers in the 1960s and 70s were highly conscious of the environment, and matters of pollution. Youth hostels offered a sort of socialist purity, where all classes could mingle in a perfectly level environment – the same kitchen and dining room, the same bunk beds and dormitories. They were also favoured by the sort of walker who is now pretty much extinct: the hitch-hiker. In the 1960s and 70s, when private car ownership had leaped up, the first few yards of every motorway in the land would feature figures standing with cardboard placards, bearing in hope the name of a destination. And there were always drivers who were willing to pick up hitchhikers. The general understanding was that the hiker would have to listen to the driver who would deliver an uninterrupted, never-ending monologue, on a subject of his pleasing. But this is perhaps unfair. Most hikers were young, most car owners were just a little older; and both understood the ecology of the road – that a car with a single driver was somehow wasteful.
Now, of course, fear of crime on both sides – the wary hiker anxious about where they are being driven, the wary driver anxious that they will be hijacked and that the vehicle will be stolen, or worse – means that hitch-hiking has virtually died out. But it is not just a fear of crime; the other thing that has happened in the intervening years is an intensified sense of private property and private space, of which the car is an extension. You would now no more invite a stranger into your car than you would your home. The space belongs to you and your family; it is not there to be shared with others.
That is exactly what makes the continued success of the YHA such a fascinating phenomenon. It seems to be the one area of British life where the notion of shared space is still absolutely intrinsic to the entire thing. To a man of John Bunting’s generation, the notion of sleeping in a room with several other completely unknown men was simply a fact of life. Now it seems quite extraordinary. In subtler ways, the times have changed. While there are still many bleaker YHA outposts, such as the Honister youth hostel which resembles nothing so much as an Antarctic expedition, places like St Briavels have quietly evolved. Yes, there are still dorms and bunks and basic washing facilities. But there is now wifi – and you are also allowed to drink.
In St Briavels, just across the road from the spectacular castle, is a bed and breakfast establishment. It advertises the fact that the rooms have en-suite facilities, as well as kettles. Even now the idea of space, of privacy, of the primacy of property, is what makes the very notion of the bed and breakfast establishment – like hostels, so long a part of the rambling tapestry – so intriguing. Especially when it seems that the cost of a room in such a house is pretty much the same as that of a room in an anonymous, economy hotel. If anything, the bed and breakfast has just as strong a claim on the collective imaginations of walkers as the youth hostel. How can it not? The idea of paying to stay in a private home, to flit through for one or two nights, to sample the hosts’ breakfast menu, to abide by the personal rules of complete strangers, is rather beguiling.
Bed and breakfasts – or guesthouses – sprang up with the nineteenth century growth of the seaside resort, and with the coming of the paid holiday. In the 1880s, thanks to the introduction of Wakes Weeks – a week in which mills closed so that all the machinery could be checked and repaired – working class holidaymakers streamed to Blackpool in their hundreds of thousands. There were a very large number of guesthouses near the centre to accommodate them. Far from being fancy, these houses, in which rooms would be rented out, were often as overcrowded and insanitary as the dwellings that the workers left behind. The streets, with their warrens of backyards, were similarly unfancy. What these houses did have was a certain rackety atmosphere of fun and escape. Families would be thrown together and just a few yards away lay all the gaudy pleasures of fairgrounds and street entertainers.
It was only a little later on that the mythos of the boardinghouse landlady began to develop; the sharp-tongued harridan who would tyrannise her paying guests into conforming to the house rules. This gorgon would be the gatekeeper, forbidding both drunkenness and any kind of sexual freedom. She started to rise to prominence as a comic caricature in the 1930s, a music hall figure of fun. The appeal lay in the idea of honest working people defying unjust authoritarianism; at work it was the foreman, and on holiday, it was the boarding house Medusa.
Now, the seaside boarding house – as opposed to the inland bed and breakfast – has a reputation for straightforward licentiousness. The bed and breakfast, on the other hand, is a curious institution that in some ways appears to have stayed lodged in a certain post-war cast of mind. In place of the raucous, plain-speaking nature of the seaside guesthouse, there is something a little quieter, more reserved, and certainly more middle class about a bed and breakfast.
There are some bed and breakfasts that live in ramblers’ lore; those that cater for the die-hard, regular Pennine Way or Yorkshire Dales walkers, for instance. A walker of my acquaintance who regularly rambles with his wife in Yorkshire is constantly e-mailing me about his recommended establishments along the routes – houses that he and his wife have been visiting for years. Owing to factors such as early retirement, and better health – or the desire for it – in old age, walkers have more time for their expeditions than they used to. Perhaps walkers are keeping the dual traditions of bed and breakfasts and youth hostels going long after both might have been expected to fade away.
Today, we have a real ‘big society’ of walkers, who are so at ease in each other’s company that all of today’s social norms concerning personal space – individual bedrooms and fully equipped en suite bathrooms – don’t really come into it. For the seasoned walker, half the fun of a youth hostel is the impossibility of a full night’s sleep. The frozen limit of anti-social behaviour is loud snoring. If anyone wants to see how Britons used to live in the 1950s, they need only join the YHA and stay at St Briavels. Ignore the wifi and the drink, and the spirit of the place is exactly the same; from the plain wooden tables to the large notice boards advertising hearty outdoor activities, making full and creative use of those vast woodlands, the place reeks of a certain kind of apple-cheeked virtue. These days, one need not venture into deep country to find such qualities; for thanks to years of environmental awareness, there is now an increasing amount of virtue also to be found hidden within big cities, as numbers of walkers are finding.